American police kill more people in one day than Norway cops have in 9 years

As tensions deepen in places like Ferguson, Baltimore, and New
York City, so does American gun culture. Civilians and law
enforcement dig in their heels on the idea that having guns
is the only way to stay safe, because the perception is that
everyone else has a gun.

But everyone doesn't have a gun. And pumping more
firepower into an already broken system won't help fix it.

The most immediate solution most experts see involves
radically rethinking how law enforcement is done, which means
relying less on force and more on face-to-face contact.

One death, a decade ago

Criminals might be the greatest perpetrators of gun violence, but
changes to the system can only come from the top.

Unfortunately, those at the top still actively participate in the
system.

Since January 1, 2015, police officers in the US have killed
more than 600 people, with 100 of those deaths
occurring in
March alone. Even if statistics
might suggest otherwise, the most visible incidents
depict law enforcement as a system that is inherently
prejudiced toward people of color.

For many, this leads to an inescapable conclusion: Police
officers are threats, not lifelines.

Compare the sobering reality in the US with another one.
In Norway, the last time a police officer shot and killed
somebody was in 2006.

According to a
new report issued by the Norwegian government, police
fired just two shots in all of 2014. In the 12 years leading up
to then, the only fatal shootings came in 2005 and 2006. Even in
2011, when terrorist Anders Breivik killed 77 people in Oslo and
Utoya, Norway police fired just once.

Here's how many times the Norwegian police have fired their guns
(including warning shots) in the last 13 years:

Norway Police

And here's how many people they injured by firing their guns over
the same time period:

Rutgers University sociologist Paul Hirschfield suspects what
makes guns so unnecessary for Norwegian cops is how the country
structures its law enforcement.

"When policing is centralized, it is possible to institute
and enforce provincial or national use of force rules," he says.
At the federal level, the government has the power to implement
sweeping programs that standardize when and how officers can use
lethal force.

But the US isn't Norway. It has 313 million more
people who lack a unified national identity and frequently
engage in crimes driven by us-versus-them
mentalities.

So what do we do?

What happens to the guns?

Guðmundur Oddsson, an Icelandic sociologist at Northern
Michigan University who studies crime across cultures,
argues that political and demographic gaps aren't the
problem.

Americans just don't trust their police
officers.

"Trust is an extremely powerful mechanism of informal
social control," Oddsson tells Tech Insider. In smaller, more
ethnically homogeneous countries like Norway, building that trust
is easy. People feel a sense of togetherness for many reasons,
including the fact that most people look similar and
hold similar beliefs.

These smaller countries also have time-honored traditions
of disarming their police officers and only lightly relying on
incarceration to disincentivize crime, Oddsson says.

If a larger and more heterogeneous country like the US wants to
emulate Norway's results, it needs to focus on building trust at
the local level possible, and multiply out from there.

"So one way to curb gun deaths is simply
to make the police more visible
and approachable in high-crime areas," Oddsson
says. "Have them engage the community in
a respectful manner. Police on foot rather than
in cars. Talk to people. Get to know them.
Participate in community events. Build trust."

That could be the only context in which stripping officers of
their guns would have a positive effect. According to
Hirschfield, disarming them outright would cause more
officer deaths at the hands of trigger-happy civilians. In the
future, it could even lead gun lobbies and police unions to
overcompensate by pushing for heavier armament.

"Disarming the police is obviously a political
non-starter in the United States," he says.

Hirschfield argues the best approach involves treating
civilians with a greater degree of respect. Police departments
should encourage their officers to recognize a problem
and solve it, rather than spot a crime and punish it.

To that end, he points to the successes of Cincinnati,
Ohio.

A model for non-violence

In 2001, a Cincinnati police officer shot and killed a
19-year-old man named Timothy Thomas after he resisted
arrest over minor crimes, including traffic violations. Following
Thomas' death, Cincinnati rioted. They were the largest riots
since the Los Angeles riots of 1992.

Cincinnati
Police Captain James Whaler talks with protesters as they march
to City Hall to show their anger over the April 7 shooting death
of Timothy Thomas by Cincinnati Police Officer Stephen
RoachReuters

Fearing intervention from the federal government and more
civil unrest, the Cincinnati police force began a novel
two-pronged approach to law enforcement in
collaboration with the Department of Justice.

Together, the agencies standardized the police
department's procedures in a bid to make civilian-officer
interactions more transparent. They also created a training
program focused
on mental health, in which officers were required to log at
least 40 hours of training before they were free to respond in
the field.

A 2013
review of the policy found dramatic reductions in the use of
force and the number of public complaints. After the DOJ's
involvement, the use of force fell from the high-water mark of
nearly 1,200 incidents in 2001 to roughly half that by 2007.
Complaints also abated, from 783 in 2003 to 64 in 2007.

According to the review's author, attorney Elliot Harvey
Schatmeier, "the DOJ’s intervention in Cincinnati provides many
lessons for reform of police departments in other cities." More
than that, Schatmeier writes, it did so "by overcoming a
recalcitrant police force and command staff, initial pushback
from city officials, and a hostile police union."

Finding the balance

As Hirschfield sees it, America has reached something of a
stalemate.

The public has reached a boiling point in its tolerance of police
violence, evidenced by national protests. But local governments
and law enforcement groups look upon these mass responses as
proof that firearms serve a justified need in society.

To break that cycle, those in power must reevaluate their
priorities, Hirschfield says. Failing to enact reform puts more
unarmed or lightly armed people at risk of being unnecessarily
shot by the police.

"Current policies in the United States are extremely
effective at protecting police from civilians but woefully
ineffective at protecting civilians from the police," he said.
"The public should be given a say in the relative
valuation of police and civilian lives."